Posts Tagged ‘christian’

The “scarlet A” that has become a symbol for the atheist “coming out” campaign.

Today I lingered for a moment on a syndicated Christian radio program as the host interviewed her guest. I listened as they reached their consensus that the explanation for atheism was the deep hurt of a father who “wasn’t there” in the atheist’s youth. They used (my beloved) Christopher Hitchen’s pronouncement that any tales of his deathbed conversion (he only recently died of cancer) should not be believed. The man on the other side of the radio interview said these words made him want to “crawl under my desk — for man is designed to be with God”. To these two Christians, then, the only explanation for not believing in God was the disappointment of a disappointing “earthly” father, not reason, not evidence, none of that nonsense.

This isn’t the first time I’ve run across this idea. If I tell an evangelical Christian that I don’t believe in God, they will almost invariably become instantly sympathetic, moved, even, as they struggle to imagine the magnitude of hurt I must have experienced that “drove me away” from God. (It’s of little consequence to them that the entire construct of that question presupposes the existence of an actual God that I could be hurt by, or disappointed in. But that is another matter).

Having considered and studied the nature of belief for some time, it now seems to me that belief in God is a natural part of being human. True, belief is not quite universal among our species, but the majority of humans do believe in some power “greater than themselves” (and by this they don’t mean the powerful forces of nature). It’s been an interesting experiment to be among the minority in this regard (and in the minority of even that minority of unbelievers by virtue of identifying myself an atheist, as opposed to agnostic).

One part of this “non-spiritual” adventure of mine is experiencing the social aspect of being in this non-religious minority within a broadly religious majority culture. But another aspect of the adventure is the challenge of being one of those humans who — unlike some of my atheist brethren — found belief to be fairly easy to go along with until it was no longer a tenable conceptual framework. In other words, I seemed to be quite able and willing to believe…right up to the moment I realized that God didn’t actually exist.

But that has put me in a challenging cognitive spot: between a rock and hard place, as it were. For it would appear that I have an evolved brain that is (like the brains of the believing majority) actually wired to believe (to conjure meaningful patterns from random events by selective emphasis) and yet I am currently not actively engaging that part of my brain. So you could say that I am, in a sense, at odds with my own biology!

But I also have what could be classified as a “critical” brain. And I don’t mean that in a completely negative sense. I think it is precisely my critical capacity — combined with a curiosity (perhaps bequeathed to me by my own earthly father) — that has made me the artist and writer that I am. After all, to progress at all in any art or profession, one must develop the capacity to evaluate one’s own performance, which in my case meant finding a balance between developing a cold eye for searching out mistakes or weaknesses in my work, and a genuine appreciation for the products of my own particular talent. But it may well be that a brain like mine — so well tuned for creating art — is not the best brain for living in a world of belief. In other words, having the brain that I have, perhaps my declension from belief was as inevitable as my acquisition of it in the first place!

When my Christianity came to an end, I felt like a hard-rock miner who had been manning a clattering drill for fifteen years who had suddenly broken through a rock wall that, instead of leading to an open chamber, was actually the last bit of crust on the other side of the earth, and so I found myself suddenly tumbling off into the vast void of God-less space. In time I began to look in wonder at Christians who had believed in God all of their lives (and would likely believe until they died). How could they do it? Was it simply a function of my determined personality that turned the seemingly virtuous trait of getting-to-the-bottom-of-things into a boring-a-hole-right-through-an-entire-belief-system character flaw?

Could be.

But getting back to the sympathetically vapid stance of our two radio people, I can honestly tell tell them that I have no beef with God. (But, based on my experience with such discussions, I don’t think they would be quite able to grasp what that really means). Like when a young friend recently asked me what my chief complaint was with God. Well, I would have to answer that I have no “complaint” with God, because, well, God does not exist as a real thing that I could have a real complaint with or about. The question itself is built upon the same presuppositions as the “bad-daddy” atheism cause I described above.

And this is where I must make a diversion into an area where things get really tricky.

So far, we’ve tended (historically) to see things in one of two ways: 1) God exists, and we were created by Him to know Him, and it is an act of sinful “will” to ignore or deny this reality; or 2) There is no god (never was), and we just made him up anyway (and so it logically follows that we can unmake him up just as easily). But I’m coming to see that it’s more complicated than that. For religious belief is based on a particular approach to interpreting naturally-occuring phenomenon, that is itself built on the natural cognitive structure of our evolved pattern-seeking (and highly social) brains. This means that what we are really talking about is a difference in the interpretation of actual phenomenon, not in the existence (or validity) of that phenomenon. So that when we say that God doesn’t exist, the believer thinks we mean that the phenomenon that a believer uses to support his or her belief doesn’t exist, (and they simply KNOW that this is bullshit). And I suspect that a lot of atheists make that subtle, but critical, mistake in their argument. But as I’ve come to say: “I believe in the phenomenon, I just don’t believe in the religious interpretation of it”.

And so when I listen to folks like those on the radio today, I hear people creating an entire argument in an imaginary space that never has to make contact with reality, only with a certain shared perception of it. And the theories and questions and challenges that emerge from that cloud end up being of no practical use to someone like me. There is no point of useful engagement with such notions. Threats of divine judgement are not ignored by the non-believer out of some injured-child defiance, but because they are hollow threats. There is nothing to back them up and, therefore, nothing to get riled about.

There are multiple levels to human behavior, and they are woven together in an way that makes their untangling a tricky thing. But this shouldn’t be surprising, for isn’t that the way of all of nature? Ecosystems and animals live in a highly interdependent dance such that any slight change in any part of that system can trigger a cascade of unforeseen consequences. And so it is with us humans when belief is removed from the cognitive equation. It may just turn out to be that unbelief is an unnatural state to some of us! This could be part of the explanation for why there aren’t more non-believers than there are: on some instinctual level folks understand the risk of leaving the security of the group think. But then we are also curious, reasoning animals, and I am certainly not the first (or only) human to come to the conclusion that he’s been believing a bunch of silliness with no basis in fact or evidence.

But then this, to me, makes the argument against God even more compelling. For even here there is a natural explanation that is consonant with other observable realities. Belief in God then is not merely a delusion, but a particular kind of illusion that is custom-fit to our mode of thinking and feeling. This, too, points to the natural evolutionary origins of belief far more than it points to an actual God. But to understand such ideas, someone in the embrace of active religious belief would have to take several significant steps back before gaining any kind of useful perspective. And this is an action that few, it seems, are willing to take.

So the atheist recognizes the reality of the world offered by science, but must then persevere through the discomforts of living a godless life with a brain “built” for belief, whereas the believer indulges in the easy comforts of a fantastical (yet custom-tailored) mindscape of that belief. Two different yet related modes of human existence as we navigate our way through the remarkable fact of our existence on this planet.

I have a memory of the first letter I ever wrote to Santa Claus. I was probably 5 years old, and had not started school. I can’t remember all of the details, of course, but I think I asked my mother if I could write Santa, even though I hadn’t yet learned to write. She assured me that I could, as Santa would understand what I was asking him.

So I put marker to paper, and scribbled lines across the page, filling it with my five-year-old’s in imitation of what writing looked like.

I must have given the note to my mother, as it turned up years later in her collection of things saved from our childhoods (at enough of a remove that I was not angry that she had interfered with the duties of the U.S. Postal Service).

I can’t tell you what I was “asking” for, nor what I actually got from Santa that Christmas. What I’m remembering is that magical state of mind where I could believe that my secret intentions could be carried by a child’s remote approximation of written language to a special man who would somehow understand what no other could.

By now you may see where I’m going somewhere with this.

The well-known “bridge to life” illustration that sold me on Jesus at the age of thirteen.

When I was thirteen I prayed the prayer shown in the back of a religious “tract” (the well-known “Bridge to Life” tract from The Navigators) and became a Christian. About a year later I found myself at a Charismatic home prayer meeting, kneeling on the floor, surrounded by fellow believers as I prayed to receive the “Baptism of the Holy Spirit”. (For those who don’t know, the “sure sign” of the “infilling” of the Holy Spirit is taken to be one’s new-found ability to “speak in tongues”. This “new” language is believed to be a “secret” language with which the believer can speak his or her innermost needs and desires directly to the Holy Spirit, who is able to interpret them.)

I remember the feeling of that moment, and the burble of the unfamiliar sound of “speaking in tongues” falling on my ear as those who surrounded me prayed to the Holy Spirit on my behalf. There was an intensity to the moment — a certain forcefulness to the voices so near my ears as they worked (I now understand) to will the Holy Spirit into me. And soon I began to babble as well, tentatively at first, but then with more confidence as my first attempts were greeted with a swelling of the volume of those whose hands rested on my back, head and shoulders. It all reached an electric crescendo as the act was completed — when my own “prayer language” came — and then quieted into whispered prayers and, finally, a sort of silent afterglow.

The other day — as I looked at some paintings on a coffee shop wall with a gallery director colleague– I mused on the idea that young artists can move through a phase where — lacking the maturity to make more confident marks — they may believe that any mark made on a canvas will somehow magically carry intention, even if the mark (or the collection of marks that make up the whole) lacks any accessible coherence. As I considered this I remembered my letter to Santa and the acquisition of my prayer language, and these three moments allowed me to triangulate an idea.

In each of these three cases of magical thinking, there is a childlike thrill to uncoupling the critical mind from the seat of pure desire and then (to use the examples I’ve presented) freely splashing paint across a canvas or scribbling lines across a page or babbling nonsense syllables to an invisible spirit. This is the joy and the appeal of magic — the kind of moments that make the skin tingle or give that widening in the base of the throat (which is where where I feel it) and offer, I think, a welcome departure from the watchful eye of our cool reason.

Little wonder, then, that they appeal to us so much as children and now — perhaps even more so for their rarity — as adults.

But a common thread to the experience of magic is this uncoupling of reason from desire — which is essentially the act of erecting a temporary barrier between two active levels of our consciousness. What we do, in effect, is put a blindfold on our frontal lobes so that we won’t be embarrassed by whatever irrational thing we’re about to do (or, more precisely: shamed by our reason for doing it).

I think we all do (or have done) this. And there is no shame in such pleasures (it’s why we love professional “magicians”, and a part of what we grieve for in the passing of childhood). But the part of it that interests me today is the uncoupling aspect, and the belief-motivated actions that follow. For when I wrote that letter to Santa (or when I first “prayed in tongues” to The Holy Spirit), I could not actually have told you what I was really asking for, because I had disengaged the part of my brain that can actually articulate anything I am thinking!

Now the teachers of these magical techniques would counter that this was exactly the point: to get my own “worldly” (read: critical, reasoning) mind out of the way and let spirit talk to spirit without interference.

The problem with that idea (and it’s a huge one) is that the “mind” and the “spirit” are not the separate entities we tend to conceptualize them as. Well, at least no more separate than one part of our brain is from another. The notion of a discrete trinity of mind/body/soul is a device to describe what are essentially different levels of the consciousness that are the product of the physical processes of our brain. That we often then externalize these parts of ourselves, assigning them a sort of cosmic autonomy, is much more a testament to our propensity for magical thought than a reflection of any verifiable reality.

But oh, the magical appeal of this idea, despite the fact that there is nothing to back it up! (Nothing, that is, except our seemingly inexhaustible craving for magic). And to many (if we’re honest about this) the craving alone is considered sufficient “evidence” for the object we so crave. Even the Bible offers our desire for God as proof of his existence. But this is proof only of our desire, and the roots of our desire are not so difficult to discern. To put it another way: would we think that a child’s belief in Santa Claus is evidence that Santa really exists and lives at the North Pole? I think not. And yet many adults use just this kind of “evidence” to support their belief in the divine.

Magic (and magical thinking) are curious and pleasing byproducts of this consciousness that we carry. This is the only thing we can say with any confidence about magic. This is the only notion of magic that reality offers us.

I realize that such a suggestion is nothing but a wet blanket to many, but I am not saying that our experience of magic is invalid. How can any of our cognitive experiences be called “invalid”, at least in the sense of not existing or occurring? Yet such experiences are always products of the way we perceive reality, and since we are clearly able to perceive things in ways that would never align with any physical reality (we can “see” things that are not there) such an experience alone is confirmatory evidence nothing other than the cognitive experience itself. This is how I view everything spiritual: I believe in the experience, I differ only in the explanation. So when someone tells me that God spoke to them, I do not for a second doubt their experience, I simply translate their God language into materialist terms: I credit their story to its actual source (their own consciousness) and not the supposed source (God).

For I know all too well that we carry in our skulls a brain that runs several (or many) levels of consciousness at one time (though there seem to be primarily three major levels: conscious, unconscious and involuntary). And I know from my own experience that the “voice” that we experience as god or spirit is an actual phenomenon of that level of our consciousness that talks back when we talk to it. (In this sense, I would have to say that god does, indeed, exist, insofar as the thing we experience as god exists. Where I would quibble is in the magical leap of making a natural cognitive event into evidence of an actual God in His Heaven).

I like coherence. I like to make sense of as much as I can reasonably make sense of in the world. Yet I expect I will always carry an ear for the siren song of magic as long as I live. The difference between me and a believer is that I have come to understand that the source of the magical experience is resident inside of me, and through understanding that a large part of the allure of the magical impulse has been removed (namely that it can actually mean something or be predictive or life-changing in some dramatic way).

To give in to magic is to give in to the incoherence of a child’s scribbled letter to Santa, or a mumbled gibberish prayer that is going not to heaven, but right back to its source. In each case we are playing with ourselves, really. And though there’s nothing wrong with that, we don’t generally like to be seen doing it in public.